Archive of ‘affiliate marketing’ category

One of the biggest obstacles for some with getting started with making money online, specifically affiliate marketing, is the idea of paying for training.

I agree that with many free blogs, free forums and other free resource sites, having to pay something like $67 per month for affiliate marketing training at AffPlaybook seems silly.

It is, until you factor in that 90% of stuff posted online is based on “theory” and/or by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

So, yes, there are free sites where you can “learn” stuff. Take note that you will be paying with your time, especially if the ratio of quality to junk is low (ie: more junk than quality), and you ultimately will be paying with your money, if you read up on bad advice and try to follow it.

While I had been an affiliate manager before, I encountered affiliates who learnt blackhat (more…)

Whether you own your own product or be an affiliate, the principle of having a sales funnel and optimizing it applies equally to you.

What is a sales funnel?

It’s a process where you introduce your leads (also known as prospects) to your marketing message, with the aim of hitting your conversion goal, either a sale, collecting the prospect’s information or some other action.

Most marketers will aim for a single goal – the sale. If the lead doesn’t buy, then there’s no followup on the action. This can be considered arbitrage, especially if you have a single opportunity to get the sale.

To make arbitrage work, the following factors will help

Buying traffic at a low price

Buying high quality traffic that converts

Getting a high payout for the offer

Note that the above goals are usually mutually exclusive. That means you probably can’t buy high quality traffic at a low price, and you won’t be able to convert low quality traffic for an offer with a high payout. If you are able to find an offer that is brand new and hasn’t been picked up by many affiliates, or if you find a traffic source that few affiliates and marketers are using, you’d have the opportunity to capitalize on the market gap (at least until other affiliates start saturating your market advantage).

For your strategy to work, you’d also need to ensure that you have enough (more…)

Note: This is a product review of AffPlaybook. If you’re interested in the AffPlaybook discount code, you can click here to access it.

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Would you pay for something that you can get free online?

Specifically training in online marketing, affiliate marketing and lead generation?

How do you compare a free Internet marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, Wicked Fire or one of the other free forums, compared to a paid forum, like AffPlaybook?

A simple reply might be “You get what you pay for”.

But let’s assume you don’t buy the “free is junk, paid is quality” argument and look at the facts.

When I’ve gone into one of the free sites, I’ve found that the content posted by members tend to consist mainly of jokes, casual chat, stuff for sale and tips.

What you get out of most Internet marketing forums?

Often the jokes and chat stuff takes up most of the bandwidth, with some members coming up with stuff or services to sell to other members. The stuff for sale could be good, especially if it’s a newer provider or developer who wants to establish themselves and do some beta testing, build up goodwill or collect customer reviews.

I see affiliates using “niche” and “vertical” interchangeably, but I think sorting your thinking straight on the key difference is going to be one of the things that helps you scale your online earnings.

At first glance both words refer to a category or topic (like gardening, or finance, or games) that you hope to theme an online marketing campaign around…so it seems similar, but it’s not.

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A niche in time…

Let’s look at some examples: A niche (variously pronounced as “nitch” or “neesh” depending on which side of the pond you’re on, or maybe how many beers you’ve had) is something specialized. So the stuff on Clickbank tends to serve a niche. For example “low calorie recipes to promote hair re-growth for vegans” would be a niche. “Dog training for hearing impaired pet owners” might be another niche. These tend to be specialist products with interest from a smaller subset of the Internet audience. The key driver of why this product does well is because the user can’t easily get this info or service elsewhere. After all, how easy is it going to be to find a book on “501 woodworking project for someone with zero technical skill”? So the $27 or $47 e-book on clickbank tends to find a ready audience.

In most cases these niche products tend to top out at a couple thousand in revenue per month. So to bank with these products, you’d usually have to market several of these types of products. If the products are related or complimentary, there exists opportunity to cross-sell and cross-promote, so you can, to borrow a phrase, “stack that money”. You might do this be cross-selling a range of photography books (outdoor photography, fashion photography, shooting kids (taking their photos, not going at them with an AWP…)). If you upsold stuff, you might sell camera paraphernalia, like camera equipment, online photo services, photo events, confences, workshops.

The times I’ve promoted niched products, I’ve felt like a sniper, shooting at demand for long tail demands for which people are willing to pay to make the pain go away, or bring themselves pleasure, or a combination of both.

Generally, you’d need to promote maybe 3 to 5 of these types of products to generate a decent income.

So when you promote a vertical, you’re addressing a potential market of millions (instead of just thousands in the case of most niche markets). The promo style is different too, which is why most CPA affiliates favor paid traffic.

You’d probably hear the familiar refrain that CPA marketing is a volume game. The more traffic you buy, the more leads you generate, the more you get paid.

In contrast to more specialized stuff, the key is to become a dominant player with each offer you promote. While niche marketers might be content with generating $5,000 per month with a niche product, the CPA marketer might aim at $5,000 per day or more in revenue to make their business model viable.

The CPA marketer is often arbitraging traffic. If your commissions exceed your traffic costs, you’re in the money. In most situations, you’d want to go for the offers with the highest potential in terms of traffic (ie: demand), scalability (how big you can grow the offer) and importantly for affiliates who think of themselves as business owners – your bottomline (how much it will put in your pocket at the end of the day).

My advice for newer affiliates is to find an offer that has potential to scale to something big and aim and work towards at least $1,000 or more a day in revenue. It’s only when you make this a goal in your overall business strategy that you will experience bump in your business and your profits.

One of the major challenges facing newer affiliates is finding time to work on their business.

The reality is that everyone is subject to the same 24 hours a day, whether you’re Richard Branson or Joe Blow starting out.

Sure, you might say that an experienced affiliate might have multiple campaigns making a couple thousand a day and mainly running, except for an hour or two of tweaking and optimization each day, so he or she has time to do ‘lifestyle blog posts’ or tweet about the massive filet mignon that they’ve chowing down at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse or Craftsteak for lunch.

In my book, all this self-justifying, non-productive structured procrastination is what leads many affiliates to knock themselves out of the game. Imagined “high competition” and reasons that the industry/offer/traffic source is dying/saturated/overpriced/sees little or no demand, is all a bunch of BS.

Let’s look at this for a moment. I think you need to make up your mind. Is the offer “saturated” or is the industry “dying”?

If it’s dying, then it’s dying. But if so, how could traffic be “overpriced” and the offer be “saturated” at the same time?

Sounds like a paradox, and not one of those fun ones either.

I’ve been speaking a number of affiliate training workshops recently, some as part of my role in recruiting and developing Neverblue affliates, as well as for local Internet marketing groups.

The major challenge that most marketers face is a mental one. Not so much that you’re going crazy at the stuff you have to deal with in figuring out how to get started, but more a lack of self-belief.

Talk to a top affiliate and you’ll realize that confidence is one of the keys that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

Even if you haven’t mastered something yet, it should not keep you from jumping headlong to figure it out.

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But back to wealth building in 15 minutes…

If you’ve sat waiting for the subway, or have time between meetings, or maybe 15 minutes before going out for dinner, what do you do with that deadtime?

Are you spending it checking your email? Or watching youtube? Checking for Facebook updates?

If instead of doing all that, you spend that time looking at ads running on high traffic websites, running keyword searches, doing competitive research, reading up on promoting techniques, that would help you more than just blowing that time doing something that you’d probably forget two days from now.

Yes, I like watching/listening to motivational stuff about “how you can do it” as much as the next guy, but I try to limit that to listen to that while I’m in the toilet or taking a shower. Because it doesn’t require your full focus.

So try this out for a couple of weeks, make a commitment to spending your time more productively. Stuff CAN be accomplished if you have a pocket of 10 minutes or more.

And now I have to complete this 15 minute blog post. Ping it, then head to my next meeting.

About Me

Hi, I’m Andrew Wee, an Asia-based internet marketer.I’ve been involved in the online world since 1997, having worked at one of Asia’s first content portals and helping to develop and project manage several content sites focused on verticals such as news, stocks, mutual funds and consumer/entertainment.Continue reading here